Maxie’s Demon (11 page)

‘Hi dere, Maxie!’ said a gruff voice.

My hair bristled, and I had just time to suck in a deep breath and scream,
‘No killing!’
That wasn’t enough, God alone knew what they might do instead.
‘Nothing serious!’

Then the panda car rounded the turn, and ran straight into the bandits. I half expected to see bodies fly, but
a morning-star mace flailed down against one wheel, a tyre burst with a resounding bang and the car screeched around and stopped. A huge cutlass smashed down through the bonnet into the engine, unleashing a fountain of milky coolant; a spear butt starred the windscreen from end to end. The siren bleated, and somebody shot it.

A steel-tipped whip whined across the car roof and caught one of the
oncoming coppers around his anoraked chest. He was a huge bugger with a moustache like a yardbrush, but the whip plucked him right off the ground and sent him skidding across the roof, smashing the light.

‘Jesus Christ!’ he screamed, goggling at the bare-breasted bird hauling him in. ‘Get the Vice Squad!’

Another cop
flicked out a telescopic baton, only to have a great broadsword take it off
an inch above his hand. He stood stupidly for a second, and the brigands piled in on him and the others, more or less barehanded.

‘Don’t hurt anyone!’
I screamed.
‘That’s an order, you hear me?’

‘We hear you,
señor
Maxie!’ giggled the brown-skinned girl. She hauled on the whip. Nose-Fungus spun off the roof in a blur and crashed into the garden behind. Then she thrust both arms through the crazed
windscreen and bodily yanked out the screaming policewoman at the wheel, considered her an instant, turned her upside down and thrust her back, head down into the footwell and instant
Folies Bergère
above, all suspenders and frilly knickers and very nice too.

The other woman came leaping up the back of the car like a springboard and took off with a whoop, over my head and down on to the cops
who’d come over the wall. With a wild scream of ‘
Maxieee-eee!’
the others went streaming by and flowed over them, while I danced around gibbering.

Sort of a giggle, when you think about it, me screaming not to hurt the Sod Squad. All right, I was doing it out of common humanity and because citizens who raise serious blisters on the Law tend to get into the tabloids –
TOERAG TOFF MAIMS OUR BOYS
IN BLUE,
with sentence to match. Not to mention getting these sort of dizzy attacks and falling down the cell steps, sometimes as often as twice a day. Even so, it didn’t feel right, somehow. I’d have got blackballed from my clubs, if you could get blackballed from my kind.

I peered
cautiously at the groaning heaps the bandits left behind. One had his parka forced down over his arms and his legs
jammed up into it, and another was handcuffed into a sort of granny knot, leg over neck. For one sickening instant I thought they’d decapitated the third, but appearances were misleading. The trousers over his head he might have got out of, if he hadn’t had his legs down the arms of his jacket and his belt wrapped tight around the package.

‘Nothing serious,’ I told them over the sound of smashing
glass. ‘Just youthful high spirits.’

Something clanked against the car, staggered by and rolled over, a dustbin on legs. Naked legs. The abraded boots looked familiar, though. Definitely not his day.

‘You’re all under arrest!’
screamed somebody from the centre of a rolling scuffle among the garbage.
‘Every bloody one of you! Oh Christ, woman – get off—’
A brief flurry, a pair of trousers flew
triumphantly in the air and something like a giant skinned rabbit dived back across the wall – to judge by the wild scream, straight into a nettle patch. Along the path the straggle-haired woman stood beneath one of the few trees left hereabouts, peering up into its lower branches, from which two pairs of naked legs dangled. She was idly stringing a vile pair of boxer shorts on her sword.

‘
You
friggin’ well give those here at once!
’ roared a voice. She nodded amiably and poked the sword upwards. There was a sharp squeal, and the leaves shivered.

‘
Don’t encourage ’er, sarge!
’ quavered another voice.
‘She ain’t bloody human! They’re mine, anyhow!’

Personally I’d have kept quiet about that, but there you are.

It all looked
very fine and right and proper, everyone seemed to be getting
acquainted, and evidently I was no longer needed here. There was the money, of course, but it was well stashed; I could come back later for that. A lot later. A shame not to be able to say goodbye and thanks, really, but it was getting properly light now; time I was off. I was just tiptoeing away past the squirming parcels of cop when I was caught up in a sudden rush and entangled in a thicket of
muscular arms and cheery idiot shouts.

‘Hey, Maxie! No sweat, baby! Alla pigs hogtied just fine!’

‘Arr, and ne’er so much as a broke bane among ’em! All alongside of yer merciful command, my fine young sir! Aharr!’

Any minute now he’d be calling me
Jim, lad!

The grins; the voices.

‘You think we let them get you ’way from us, Maxie
mi capitan?’

I was spun around from one to another, and the
gathering light showed me them more clearly this time. It hadn’t been the dope. They were very much there, and they were just exactly as weird as I remembered them; and ghosts they weren’t. The black guy was still grinning, rubbing the protruberant breastplate as if it was his real belly; his jet-black cheeks were ridged with cicatrix marks, but elaborate gold bracelets jangled on his arms. The
wild old guy with the Robert Newton voice really did look piratical, and it wasn’t just the dirks and cutlasses in his huge belt, or his ragged jerkin and pantaloons and stocking-cap. Over every inch they left bare he sprouted tattoos, some of them the usual mermaid and anchor stuff but others apparently done by a sex-mad Tibetan on bhang, all punctuated by a nice assortment of scars. His grin was
gap-toothed, with tobacco juice drooling out of the corners to stain his scrawny beard yellow; his wiry forelock had evidently been smoked the same shade. He looked really vile, and you could tell he just loved it.

There was the
lanky Teutonic type, or maybe Scandinavian, with blond-beast looks that stopped short at a vicious-looking slot of a mouth and receding chin beneath, a bodybuilder frame
with an adolescent sod-you slouch. I’d seen a couple of killers who looked like that. There the Oriental, twirling his moustache and looking about as inscrutable as a red-hot skewer. He didn’t look Chinese – Korean, maybe, or something more exotic, a Burmese Karen maybe, with that great plume of hair. He did look stark raving mad.

There were those bloody women, leaning on one another and giggling
manically till their bare brown boobs bounced and their daggers jangled. They were waving their trophies, including a crinkled old jockstrap and those eyewatering shorts (mauve, with dayglo teddy bears). I hated to think what they might have taken instead. There were …

A couple of others
I still couldn’t make out. But they were crowded to the back as the others all came pushing enthusiastically
in on me. All told, they were about as reassuring as Attila the Hun’s PR team.

‘
Listen!
’ I panted. ‘Look, thanks, thanks a whole heap – I mean thanks very much,
très très
professional and a treat to see and all that – but I really have got to get out of here fast, still – and—’

Me and my big mouth. I was about to ask them to help me get the money down; I should have done that first. I knew how
fast they reacted, didn’t I?

The next thing I knew I was swept off my feet, right up to shoulder height – and I
really
hoped that hand was a woman’s. Then before I could get my breath back they literally ran away with me. The pace was terrific, and they just flowed over anything in their path. When they came to a wall they boosted each other over, and whirled me across from hand to hand, too
dazed and winded to call out. It was like one of those races at army shows, with teams of panting squareheads manhandling guns or casualties or something over an obstacle course. This lot could have given them teamwork pointers. They went over a railway fence, barbed wire and all, without so much as breaking stride. Or even looking out for a train.

And every time I sailed past there’d be a friendly
nod and a wink and a slap, a cheery reassurance that made me want to kill them all horribly. I kept having this mental vision of a huge bundle of notes tiptoeing quietly away.

Beyond my flailing
feet rose the high walls of the old warehouse district, turning its back alleys into deep shadow canyons that only seemed darker as the first sunbeams slanted across the open streets beyond. We didn’t
go that way. This lot were adepts at keeping out of sight, and we slipped from shadow to shadow like returning ghosts. All the threshing I could do made no difference, and it was only when they checked, momentarily, in the shadow of a twenty-foot brick wall that I drew enough breath to roar at them. Instantly I was lowered featherlight on to my feet, with hands dusting down my clothes, patting down
my hair, and generally smoothing me out.

‘Hey, whatsa matter, Maxie?’

‘Ees anything amiss?’

‘De wall’s no sweat, ve can—’

‘
No!
I mean, thanks, thanks again, but you shouldn’t – run away with me like that! Where’re you taking me, anyway? There were … things I wanted to go back for first!’

‘Possessions? Arr, dross, trash, nothings! What’ll ye need o’them when we’re a-layin’ the bloody world
at yer feet? Only come now—’

‘I said
—I mean, I asked,
where’re you taking me?’

‘Why, to de sheep, of course!’

‘Sheep – Jesus, not again! I don’t
want
to go to your sheep –
I mean
—’

Instant groans of hurt
and disappointment all round.

‘Ya you do! No place safer dan dere! No place you’ll find more friend!’

‘Those pigs of constables shall not emprise you there,
señor
! Come, be kind, accompany
us!’

‘Aye, aye, lad, ye’ll not be lettin’ yer true shipmates down!’

‘We shall sail, lord Maxie, far beyond their grasp, to realms of pearls and gold and finest jade, to palaces of fair walks and languid concubines making drowsy music, to sunny pleasure domes with caves of ice—’

I twitched. ‘Come again?’ The Oriental didn’t strike me as the literary type. Kung Fu or Shun Tzu, if anything, not
Coleridge.

He twirled his moustache. ‘The lord Maxie does not believe me? Behold, and wonder!’

He whisked one of those horrible swords off his back, so fast it whistled. A Japanese sword, not the graceful samurai curve but the straight, vicious ninja blade. That figured. He whirled it in true schlock-film fashion, but fast, so fast it seemed to open a shimmering umbrella of steel before my eyes,
drawing them in. And in that hissing circle of light an image formed and grew.

I blinked. A
girl, Japanese probably – though the Oriental didn’t look that, either. Not your actual geisha, though. They’ve got this thing about little schoolgirl uniforms there, and that’s what she was wearing, more or less, and she was looking pretty cheerful about it. She wasn’t just a picture, either. She was
smiling, reaching out – to me. She knew I was there. She mouthed my name, and writhed a little. And behind her there was a blonde girl, falling out of an old-fashioned négligé – a bit too top-heavy for my taste. An old-fashioned idea, or an Oriental one – like all those bug-eyed manga heroines, maybe. And a black girl, just as overdeveloped, another, some kind of Polynesian—

I blinked again.
My own private Miss World, all clearly longing for little me. Invisible coils of heady fragrance snaked around me, tickling my nose and other sensitive areas. How the hell I noticed what the black guy was doing I can’t imagine, but I vaguely saw him upend his helmet above the arc of the blade. Out of it tipped a spill of coins, a stream of gems, strings and sprays and necklaces of many strands, cascading
down among the girls as they squealed and giggled and snatched at them.

Abruptly the sword was rock-still before my eyes, mirroring the same image in its glossy greenish metal. The girls were writhing at the foot of a dais below a huge black leather chair, a sort of modern throne, plutocrats and mad dictators for the use of, flanked with macho-looking guards in ducky leather uniforms and brutal
machine-guns. It looked as if somebody’d hired Dr No’s interior decorator. I half expected Ilya Kuryakin to come abseiling down the chandelier any moment.

To either side men were bowing, men in immaculate suits, men who had the very stamp of tycoons and
zaibatsu
bosses, the kind of characters who looked down on mere millionaires like my father’s City friends as they might look down on me, falling
to their knees or being forced there by the goon squads. But the casually elegant figure in the chair ignored them and went on tossing riches to his pampered toys …

Guess who?

Well, OK. I mean,
I know about come-ons, I’ve been a strip-club barker, and this was strictly for the cheap seats. The guards, for a start. I knew the real me would be more frightened of them than my enemies ever would.
I’d go all paranoid and start sleeping on beds floating on mercury pools, like some old Chinese emperor, so the assassins couldn’t creep up on me. Mind you, with all that nice mercury vapour they wouldn’t need to.

Not that the vision didn’t have some effect, especially when I imagined Ahwaz among the kowtowers. Even then, though, my fantasies didn’t go much further than a really good boot up
his jacksy and a short spell in the snakepit – short, because snakes are sensitive animals and I’d hate to hurt their feelings.

The same went for this lot.

‘Yeah, yeah!’ I said brightly, easing the sword aside with a gentle finger. ‘Really nice, but … look, I’m not really into all that, not the type really, I just want to get my mo – my
things,
and, well, settle down for a while and think about—’